Although Advanced Micro Devices will address the rapidly developing market of tablets, the company has no plans to address the market of smartphones in the foreseeable future. Even though AMD's Bobcat micro-architecture is "sub-1W capable", the firm has no intention to create a chip for sub-1W devices.

"We have no intention of entering the smartphone space at this point of time. We are not in the process of developing [a] baseband [chip] and this is a clear statement. There are enough players in the is market that have a hard time earning money," said interim chief executive Thomas Seifert at the Goldman Sachs Internet and Technology Conference, reports PC Magazine.

The market of smartphones is growing rapidly and AMD's arch-rival Intel Corp. plans to unveil a special system-on-chip for those handsets later this year. Although Nokia, the company that was believed to be interested in an Intel Atom system-on-chip recently decided to start using Windows Phone 7 operating system  that is not supported by the code-named Medfield SoC, the chip giant is still optimistic about x86-based mobile SoCs.

It is widely believed that Dirk Meyer, the former chief executive of AMD, was fired because he did not have a plan to play on the market of tablets as well as smartphones. Based on the comment made by the interim chief executive officer, it looks like the company still does not have smartphone-related plans. Nonetheless, at least slate form-factor is now considered seriously.

"So we see that there are parts of this form factor that move in our direction. We were really happy to see the Acer just in the beginning of the month launched the first Windows based tablet based on our low power Bobcat architecture. So we see that there are usage scenarios in this tablet segment that move towards our capability. At the same time, we are continuing to work hard on reducing our power consumption for our products in the low power segment and the same time being able to deliver and continue to deliver cutting edge graphics capability. So especially with the products - with the second generation APU products that are on the roadmap for next year, we feel confident that we can also address a significant amount of those form factors out in the tablet space,"  added Mr. Seifert.

Tags: AMD, Fusion, 28nm, Wichita